Nevis & Charlestown

Nevis is a single green cone rising out of the sea, its peak nearly always wearing the cloud that gave the island its name — Columbus's 'Nuestra Señora de las Nieves' — with a Georgian town of stone and wood at its western foot and, around its skirts, the sugar estates that became the Caribbean's most graceful inns. Charlestown is where Alexander Hamilton was born, in a house that is now the island's museum; Montpelier is where Nelson married Fanny Nisbet in 1787; the Bath Hotel, of 1778, was the first hotel in the Caribbean and still steams. Nothing here hurries, including the vervet monkeys.

The traveller crosses from St. Kitts on the ferry or the water taxi through the Narrows; walks Charlestown's small grid to the Hamilton house and the Saturday market; swims Pinney's Beach and drinks a Killer Bee at Sunshine's shack; soaks in the hot spring below the Bath Hotel; dines at a plantation inn — Montpelier, the Hermitage, Golden Rock — under mahogany trees; visits the botanical garden; and, if the legs and the weather agree, climbs Nevis Peak with a guide, a steep, muddy, rope-assisted morning that ends, on the rare clear day, with the whole Leewards below.

The Guide's honesty: Nevis is quiet by design and expensive by inheritance — the inns are the experience and priced as such, and the guesthouses in town are the modest alternative —; the Peak hike is genuinely hard and wants a guide and dry weather, not a whim; the monkeys are charming and thieves; taxis are set-price and drivers are historians; and the island's calm is the point — those who want a Strip should stay across the water in St. Kitts and visit for the day.